Les and his gaming
After becoming a complete family unit with Les by our side, the gamer came out of us both. Computer gamer to be exact. We started with the Commadore 64 with a tape deck for which Les would always be coming home with a game he had found for sale in the local news paper shop. Usually from the publisher KIXX. There was one game which Les absolutely loved on the C64, Silk Worm. He had an interest in anything related to planes and helicopters so I think this may be why he took to this particular game. All the time that we were doing our gaming on the C64, when we went food shopping we would always go to the computer shop which is part of the shopping complex. In this shop they had advertised the Amiga 500 and Les and I were always mesmerized whatever they had playing on it and the variety of games avalible.
One year I had been asking for an Amiga for christmas. I was always told it was too expensive and we couldn't afford one. Usually I would use the time alone at home to try and find my coming christmas presents but there was never any sign of an Amiga.
On christmas morning that year, my wish was granted. Through the very hard work and saving by my mum and Les, they had managed to get one (the cartoon classics pack). I remember being completely over ther moon about it and I think Les was excited too.
From this point on Les and I became avid gamers. Les found and fell in love with the original "Wing Commander" and I would play games that were fashionable with my friends at the time. We had quite the library of games in the end. Alien Breed was the one that we would both play with equal interest. As you know, technology grows very quickly and it soon became obvious that the Amiga was losing it's grip on the market and that the PC was moving ahead. We bought one PC, a 386 with 640kb RAM which I guess was our jumping off point in to the PC gaming world. It would run very few games but we were both learning how to use one at the time so when it finally came time to buy a current generation PC (current for the time) we knew exactly what we wanted. The selling point we were most interested in was : Can it run Wing Commander 3? but it had more than just the ability to play games, it could be used by my mum for her studying too.
The first "New" PC we bought was a Pentium 75 with 4MB of EDO. Which quickly got upgraded to a Pentium 90 with 8MB as fifa soccer required more RAM.
Before leaving the UK, the last spec I remember the system at was a Pentium 133 with 8MB EDO and a 3DFX card. Throughout all the years that I was away, Les's interest in gaming grew enormously. Partly because of his friend "Steve" who always had the lastest tech and games but also because of Les's enthusiasm for PC gaming.
Once I returned to the UK in 2006, Les had aquired a high end system, I believe he was using an Nvidia 9800 at the time (can't conirm that). That card was sat on a gaming level motherboard with particularly expensive RAM and I think it was an Athlon 64 3000. Very high end for 2006. He had become an avid fan of the game Crysis and was pretty good at it to say the least. Crysis 2 was added to the list as soon as he had upgraded the hardware a little. Of course he played more than just that one game, but it's the one I can remember him being adept at playing online.
I was in the UK for the next 5 years and I advised him on what upgrades he would need to run what games. The final setup I remeber was an SLi setup and Les seemed to be very happy with the results.
Even though I had moved out of the UK again, Les and I would chat on skype and he would often mention the battlefield games so I think he may have started Battlefield 3.
Les was a true computer gamer, through and through. He never even picked up a console controller, his interest was in PC gaming only. I am forever in appreciation for Les's following the PC rather than console. It is now my career choice and probably will be for years to come. If Les hadn't have become a PC enthusiast, I would probably have ended up in a dead end job with no enthusiasm for future promotions. I owe him my life in this respect.